Do I need to set ini_set( 'default_charset', 'UTF-8' );?

Question

My framework for each pages does the follow:

ini_set('mbstring.internal_encoding','UTF-8');
ini_set('mbstring.func_overload',7);
header('Content-Type: text/html; charset=UTF-8');

Do I need to do a ini_set( 'default_charset', 'UTF-8' ); too?

Answer 1

No, you don't have to.

header('Content-Type: text/html; charset=UTF-8');

sets this for every page already

Answer 2

Please see https://bugs.php.net/bug.php?id=29983 looks to me like some distros still have the problem

test case

echo "ini_get('default_charset') ". ini_get('default_charset')."<br>";

if (!ini_set('default_charset', 'utf-8')) {
echo "could not set default_charset to utf-8<br>";
}

Answer 3

When it comes to the http-header, you're OK as the other answers explain.

But: There are some functions that are default charset aware

From the description of FILTER_SANITIZE_FULL_SPECIAL_CHARS:

Like htmlspecialchars, this filter is aware of the default_charset and if a sequence of bytes is detected that makes up an invalid character in the current character set then the entire string is rejected resulting in a 0-length string.